The White Rose

The queen is dead.

They come to break the news as he is breaking his fast. A fever, brought on by childbirth. The child dead, too, not two days past.

The message delivered, they stand fiddling awkwardly with the velvet edges of their caps, which they'd removed in haste when they entered the room. He thanks them and ushers them out, attendants and all, closing the door on their backs. It is said a king is never alone, but today he wills it so.

The bed lies sullen and empty at the edge of the room; he clambers in and under the furs, turning to stare blankly at the intricate symbols carved into the posts that bracket him at all four corners. He had commissioned the frame for their wedding, the first of many architectural enterprises he would undertake as monarch. She'd teased him mercilessly for it over the years, wondering whether, in depicting himself triumphing over the bestial triumvirate of lion, dragon and snake, he had hoped to inspire the same outcome with his bride. (In truth, she stands beside him an equal in the elaborate design; as much the conqueress as he is the conqueror.)

It strikes him, suddenly, that these images – these petty idols – are all he has left of her; all he will ever have, from now until the end of his days. Grief paralyses him at the thought, usurping his senses and threatening to block his airways. First his son, but fifteen-years old and heir to the Crown, taken just months after his own happy union with the tender Catalina, daughter of Aragon. Now his wife, his White Rose, ripped from him also.

He remembers clearly that day in April, not yet a year past, when he’d received word of Arthur's passing. Someone had sent one of the Observant friars to tell him, supposing, perhaps, that a holy man might fare better in the task. A terrible duty, after all, to inform one chosen by God that the Lord had seen fit to rid him of his heir. The good friar looked much as his councilmen had earlier that morning, sombre and fraught, asking, rather elusively, whether God in providing good fortune should not also take it away? He had known then that his son was dead.

His wife was summoned immediately so that they might endure the painful sorrow together. She, ever loving, had held him as he wept, peppering his face with chaste kisses as she murmured words of comfort, gentle assurances that they were yet young, and could have more children should they wish it. But when she'd left him to return to her own chambers, she, too, had succumbed to despair, and it had been his turn to hurry through the castle and bundle her into his arms as she cried. It was that very night they had conceived their seventh child, and in so doing, unwittingly sown the seeds of her demise.

Was it for Warwick, he wonders, and Warbeck too? A life for a life. A son for a son; a sister for a brother. He ought to have done as he always had and locked the pair of dissidents back up in the Tower, where they could do little more than whisper to each other through the floorboards. But the Spanish sovereigns had refused to send their precious infanta if he could not assure them that his realm was no longer beset with rebellious machinations. Yes, it was surely then that the Heavenly Father had turned from him, for he’d ever been in His favour before the Earl and the Duke – one a true-blooded Plantagenet, the other nothing but a fraud – were sent to the noose.

His mind returns to his own betrothal to Elizabeth, that singular rose of York. It had, at first, been a marriage of convenience, a way to make good on his word and secure his legitimacy. But over the years, the enmity faded, leaving love to blossom in its place.

Today would have marked her thirty-seventh birthday. A gift now sits abandoned on the table where he had taken his meal: a beautiful book of hours. He had spared no expense, patronising the most renowned illustrators in the land to embellish its pages. For the evening’s entertainment, he’d intended to rally the musicians and nobles of the Court so they might dance together, if she was well enough, and gamble (a shared weakness, one of many that made theirs an excellent match).

But there would be no such celebration, no revelry. Not this day, nor any day hence.

~*~

He does not leave his chambers for six weeks. When he emerges, his hair is white, his vision faded; and he seems to have aged whole decades during his short seclusion. He no longer looks like a blessed king of England but rather an old, ailing man, withered and deathlike. For those who knew him in his youth, they can scarcely believe this is the same being who claimed the crown at Bosworth Field. The creature who stands before them now is a broken, fractured thing.

The grief clings to him like the plague, a thick black cloud about his person. Everywhere he goes, the people part on both sides, as if he were the Hebrew prophet of old.

His character is likewise altered, irrevocably so. Where once he was just, peaceable and wise, he becomes irascible and cruel. Possessed by a nascent paranoia, he keeps his surviving son close; his finances closer still. In time, his subjects will come to malign him as readily as they once cheered his name during his many peregrinations through the realm.

When he sees, one day, that the pigment has faded on one of the many Tudor roses he keeps dotted about the palace, he orders for them all to be repainted. Yet, inexplicably, the red bleeds into the white at every attempted restoration, eclipsing the ivory petals into obscurity.

The White Rose extinguished, leaving only the Red.